Topic: The craft of comedy
Tonight is the DC Comedy Showcase finals at the DC Improv. I'm not going, but I wish everyone luck (a stupid and disingenuous thing to do, because they can't all win, right?). I'm in the Drafthouse Comedy Challenge tomorrow. Also tomorrow, I'll post my most recent podcast, which is about comedy contests (featuring some of the guys in tonight's Comedy Showcase). It's comedy contest season in DC.
I don't want to rehash too much stuff that I covered in the podcast, but I do want to hurry up and get some of my opinions about contests on the record before tomorrow night, at which point whatever I say could be perceived as sour grapes or gloating. So here we go:
I think that comedy contests are good for comedy but bad for comics. Contests are good for one reason and one reason only: they create shows that would not otherwise exist. For example, if the Drafthouse cancelled their comedy challenge, they wouldn't replace it with a comedy showcase; they'd replace it with a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Contests bring crowds. Contests encourage comics bring their friends – some contests are almost entirely bringer shows. People are intrigued by contests and like the competitive aspect - witness that virtually every popular reality show includes the competitive element. Practically anything that brings audiences to see comedy is good for comedy.
Okay, enough being positive: contests are terrible. They’re discouraging. They’re unfair. They’re stupid – what’s more subjective than comedy? No matter how well run – and some contests actually are well run – they’re still unbalanced and arbitrary. And here’s something that came out in the podcast that I hadn’t thought about much before: contests stoke the competitiveness between comics.
There’s already plenty of competition in comedy. It’s just the nature of the business, and I don’t think it can be gotten rid of. My generation of DC comedians tried very hard to avoid competitiveness between comics, which was a well-intended effort but, in hindsight, probably also a bit naive. The people in the most recent podcast, who are a bit younger than me, were big enough to admit to competitiveness, which I think is a positive step. As Bryson said, admitting to competitiveness is a bit like admitting to racist tendencies: it’s healthier to acknowledge it and manage it than to try to deny it.
Personally, I think I’m making progress in the way I approach contests. I’ve seen such stupid things happen in contests that it’s getting easier to actually convince myself that they don’t mean anything. In the past, when I’ve lost to shitty comics it’s eaten at me for weeks; this time, I’m just going into the contest with the knowledge that it’s extremely likely that something I view as completely unfair will happen (for the record, I don’t know whom I’m competing against tomorrow). Of course, it’s hard not to not care when money, opportunities, or prestige are on the line, so I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want to win. But, if – wait, when I lose, I honestly think that I’ll be more pissed off about the money than the competitive aspect. It’s greed, not ego. I think that counts as progress.
So, I think that we’re stuck with contests, and we’re also stuck with the competitiveness that they inspire. Probably the best thing to do is realize: 1) Contests are extremely random, so it probably doesn’t make much sense to let results affect your mentality too much one way or the other, 2) We don’t need to go through the charade of pretending that we don’t care about the outcome; we just need to try to keep our competitiveness from turning into vitriol.
